Chapter Text
Perhaps she’d been foolish in the beginning — thinking the war could be won without sacrifice, with words instead of swords, that if not whole, the realm could heal its fractures and the succession could become one of the footnotes of history Septas would go over with unruly children. But it had been fire and blood, such is the way of Targaryens, the war only over because there is no one left, for it has been won over the bodies of nearly everyone who might have made the winning mean something — her own boys first among them, Aegon and Aemond and Daeron, all of them in the ground, the sacrifice of House Targaryen great, the vassal houses greater, but the smallfolk greatest of all.
Out of all the lives she’d brought into the world, only Helaena remains, something Alicent thanks the Gods daily in her prayers for, and little Jaehaera, who’s only six and already betrothed to a future king in a war-ending compromise.
Rhaenyra has fared no better, which is the cruelty Alicent had not braced for — that grief would prove so scrupulously even-handed; Jacaerys gone at the Gullet, Lucerys long before in the storm over Shipbreaker Bay, Joffrey thrown from a dragon, her king consort dead at Harrenhal in a manner the singers have already begun to lie about — so that the two of them sit now on opposite sides of a board that has been swept very nearly clean, a pyrrhic victory. It is difficult to feel triumphant with so much loss, though Rhaenyra's council manages it admirably, most days.
Even the dragons, the very sign of the house, are mostly memory now. Of all those terrible beasts that spelled such grievance for the land and stood as the mark of Targaryen supremacy, only the twins' two remain — and Syrax, who yet lives but cannot take to the skies anymore, grounded by the damage she suffered from the Hightower archers.
Alicent however, has been spared, with relatively little personal cost. She retains her life, her gowns, her rooms, her servants — but she knows precisely what that is worth. Helaena and her both kept alive, unchained, permitted to go about the Keep, much like before the war, a thing the smallfolk call mercy (Rhaenyra the Merciful, in contrast to the title given to her at the start of it all) and Rhaenyra’s council calls a distinctly womanly strike of nostalgia by the Queen.
Alicent has fewer illusions than most and calls it for what it is — insurance and reassurance both— even though a captive dowager is only worth as much as the faction that might rally for her, and her faction is dead. Were any of her sons still breathing, she would’ve been a piece worth guarding, a mother to bargain through, instead she is just the remnant of Viserys’ rule, a familiar figure to parade around and reassure the realm that no more will change.
A better woman would have been undone by the grief of the past year — inconsolable, a shadow of herself, the picture of a mother who had buried her sons. Alicent is not that woman, and she has stopped pretending, at least to herself, that she is.
She prays each morning, dutifully, for the souls of the dead, and rises from her knees each morning into the least unhappy life she has known since she was fifteen years old. The war took her sons, her crown, her father and purpose both— and handed her, in exchange, the only two things she had ever actually wanted; her daughter and Rhaenyra.
Rhaenyra, who comes to her in the evenings. Rhaenyra asks her counsel and takes it, defers to her on the court she ran for her father for years, looks at her across a desk in the failing light with something in her face that Alicent had thought long dead in them both; they confessed it some months past, and have been since inseparable— together in all but the word, which neither of them will say out loud.
It is, she thinks, a phantom. A copy of the life that might have been theirs had the gods arranged any other order — had Rhaenyra presented as an alpha a few years sooner, before Viserys looked at her and saw a convenient womb.
She’s always been deeply selfish, if dedicated to hiding that part of herself behind righteousness and piety, possesive of the ones she loved, but now, in the ashes of it all, she lets herself take what she can, spending most mornings with Helaena and Jaehaera in either their chambers or the Godswood, the rest, when time permits it and appearances allow, with Rhaenyra— though never at her own terms, another thing that smarts but Alicent’s grown used to not getting what she wants, since her mother died.
Unlike before Viserys died, she cannot go about the Keep as she wills it, cannot march into Rhaenyra’s chambers or request her presence; a dowager queen does not present herself unannounced to the chambers of the woman who’s unseated her son, as the Keep has too many curious ears, and what they share the realm is not permitted to see – so it is Rhaenyra who comes to her, as much as she’s able, though selfishly, for Alicent is never quite enough.
And because the truth has at last been said between them, there are nights when Rhaenyra comes not for counsel but for Alicent herself. That, too, has become part of the pattern of Alicent’s days, part of this strange afterlife the war has left her – that when Rhaenyra is finally in her rooms, finally past the door and the servants and the watchful world outside, it is often Alicent who closes the last step between them. Alicent who takes the Queen by the sleeve or the wrist or the back of the neck and pulls her down into a kiss before sense can pull them back, even as Rhaenyra is the alpha between them.
She has spent years being denied her, then a year certain she had lost her forever, and now that Rhaenyra may, sometimes, be had, Alicent finds she wants with very little dignity and less shame than she might once have expected of herself. There are evenings Rhaenyra comes to speak of some dreary matter of the realm, and Alicent listens, gives sensible answers, and all the while cannot think of anything but the shape of Rhaenyra’s mouth and the relief of having her in reach.
She had not known Rhaenyra could be gentle. That is the thing that undoes her — not the want, which she had braced for, but the gentleness underneath the want, the victorious queen who had burned half the realm to keep what was hers gone unbearably careful in the dark, slow and reverent and watchful, after all the dead between them, the only thing in the world Rhaenyra wished to do was be tender with her. No one has been tender with Alicent Hightower in her life. She had not known to want it and now cannot stop.
And then Rhaenyra leaves.
She must — cannot stay, cannot be seen at dawn coming from these rooms, cannot ever once let the morning find them tangled in bed like any other two lovers — and so she dresses in the dark and goes, leaving Alicent to lie in the cooling sheets and listen to the bolt draw back and the door fall shut, and on more nights than she’s willing to admit, when the alpha leaves, so does Alicent’s composure, and she lets herself weep for what they cannot have.
In a way, the way that they are now is worse than had they stayed on opposite sides, those nights prove that she could have had this. That there exists no version of their lives in which she is permitted simply to fall asleep beside the woman she loves and wake beside her, that the closest she will ever come is a few stolen hours, that she is meant to call this fortune, and does, because the alternative is to have had none of it at all.
This, she suspects, is the wound Rhaenyra cannot leave alone — for Rhaenyra feels it too, Alicent is certain of it.
Still, even being chosen and knowing the truth behind Rhaenyra’s feelings, there are some things she must bear alone; her heats, for one — she must spend them alone, her chambers stifling and sour with her scent, as the Queen cannot afford to break down the doors and tend to her lover, must be instead kept away so the truth of their connection is not uncovered – so she suffers them alone and tells herself she does not mind it; that preserving Rhaenyra’s crown is more important than indulging her own body.
Rhaenyra’s ruts, however, she suspects are not spent in such saintly solitude. The realm cannot be left without a ruler for so long; petitions do not cease because the Queen is feral with want. Alicent is not a fool and never has been. A name forms in her mind— a certain Lyseni woman, who’s wormed her way into both Rhaenyra’s bed and her council chamber back when the war was at its’ beggining and Rhaenyra still on Dragonstone.
They don’t talk about Rhaenyra’s ruts, and how she spends them. There is no alternative that would make the speaking of it anything but cruelty to them both, and so it sits between them unaddressed.
One morning, before she's had the chance to visit Helaena, Rhaenyra comes through the door, dressed for the day, but without her crown — though not, Alicent notes, any less burdened by it.
“Rhaenyra?” Alicent greets, halfway out of her seat. For a horrible moment she thinks something must have happened to Heleaena or Jaehaera or something equally as alarming to have the Queen visit her so early. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened. All’s well.”
“You wouldn’t come at this hour for nothing.”
Alicent waits. Rhaenyra’s always been bad at this, would rather go in circles for an hour than say whatever she’s come to say directly, and Alicent at this point knows when to wait it out and when she needs to drag it out.
“Come with me. There’s something I’d like you to see.”
Alicent sighs, recognizing the tone, that Rhaenyra wouldn’t leave it alone until she saw whatever Rhaenyra wanted her to see. “Very well. Please bear in mind I promised Jaehaera I’d do needlework with her in an hour.”
She does not know what she is expecting. She follows Rhaenyra through the eastern passage and into the small south courtyard, which had been a practice yard under Viserys and a muddy afterthought under Aegon, and she stops in the entrance because what is in front of her is white roses — three long beds of them, lavender running the edges, a stone bench at the far end set to face the morning light, and an espalier of something she doesn't recognize yet climbing the south wall, and she stands there for a long moment simply taking it in.
“Oldtown roses.” she murmurs. She’d recognize them anywhere; they outlined the outer walls of the Hightower from before she was born, the smell a sharp memory of home.
“The white ones, yes, I had them brought from the Reach; I had them plant what I remembered you describing from your childhood — it’s been a while so maybe it’s not right — you will have full control of it of course, to change it as you like.”
She’d said that, yes, in passing. She’d been fifteen perhaps, and homesick, missing her mother and the Hightower, back when they were still close and Rhaenyra her most trusted confidante—she remembers how Rhaenyra promised she’d have the servants find them and bring to Alicent, but then Viserys happened and the roses remained a memory.
Alicent crosses the small distance between them, and she takes Rhaenyra's face in her hands the way she has been learning to do, the way that still shocks her a little each time, that she is allowed to do this now, that she simply can — and Rhaenyra's arms drop from their folded position and come around her waist— and Alicent kisses her in the middle of the morning, and Rhaenyra kisses her back, slow and sure and present, like there’s nowhere else she’d rather be.
No one has ever kissed Alicent like she was something to be careful with.
When she pulls back she keeps her hands where they are. Rhaenyra's eyes open slowly.
“You remembered,” Alicent says. It comes out quieter than she means it to.
“I always listened. Even when you thought I wasn't.”
Alicent smooths her thumb along her jaw and Rhaenyra turns into it, almost shyly.
“The wisteria’s a good touch.”
“Thank you.”
“You should have told me,” Alicent says, quiet. “I would have liked to watch it grow.”
“I wanted it to be perfect for you, not another thing you’d have to work on — just something done, something you can enjoy.”
“How did you manage to get the royal treasurer to indulge you? I can’t imagine Beesbury going along with sending a retinue all the way down to Oldtown for some seeds and planters?”
Rhaenyra works her jaw, looking away. “I had to tell the council it was for the Keep, a garden for the ladies of the court to walk, like my mother had tended to before her passing.” her mouth twists. “I couldn’t very well tell them I was building you a piece of Oldtown because I wanted you to feel more at home.”
“Rhaenyra–” Alicent tries to interrupt, recognizing at once the tail end of a conversation they’d had too many times to count at this point. Rhaenyra, not used to being denied anything, rattling against the constraints their circumstances impose on their relationship.
“That’s the worst of it. Not the garden, but the lie I had to tell to make the garden. I cannot give you anything Alicent, not openly, so that anyone might see it for what it is. I sit on the Iron Throne and I cannot have a garden planted for the woman I love. You deserve more than a few stolen hours whenever the realm permits.”
“I know,” Alicent says, pulling back just enough to look her in the eye. “I also know I’d rather have our stolen moments than nothing at all. After everything — after I was so certain we'd destroyed every last thing between us — I would rather have this, Rhaenyra, than nothing at all, what we have is a blessing and I will keep telling you until you believe it.”
“You should be able to have things properly,” she insists, stubborn.
Alicent tilts her head, something wry pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Well.” She lets a small breath out. “You can't exactly marry me, can you.”
She means it as a gentle way to steer the conversation elsewhere, to not have to go through the old song and dance again – because she’s gone through it all before, gently the first few times and then less gently since. A small joke to dissolve the pressure.
Rhaenyra doesn't laugh. “No,” she says, slowly. “I suppose not.”
"Come," Alicent says, before it can go further. She takes her hand and draws her toward the bench, toward the morning light. "Sit with me. I have almost an hour." She settles, tugs Rhaenyra down beside her.
It’s a few days after the garden, after Alicent’s had word with the royal gardener, Rhaenyra able to get away from the last audiences of the day, instead trusting them to Corlys, pushing the doors open, still clad in her full regalia, crown and all, crimson cloak pinned to her shoulders by the dragon-headed chain, an image, that still to this day, just does something to Alicent.
The omega doesn’t even let her cross the room fully, immediately coming in front of her with the eagerness of a serving girl, fingers hooking through the chain, and uses it shamelessly to pull Rhaenyra in.
“Good evening to you as well, love.”
“It is now. Though, you took your time, didn’t you?”
“Unfortunately the realm never sleeps, and has need of its’ Queen occasionally, even though I’d rather just spend all day fused with you.”
Alicent rolls her eyes at the line, even as part of her preens.
“Wait, before I forget.” Rhaenyra pulls back, fishing in the pockets of her cloak, producing with more care than the thing deserves, a fat purple caterpillar, lazily crawling along her cupped palms. “I found it on one on the walls in the corridor, will you give it to Healena — I don’t think she had this one in her sketchbook, and I think it’d break her heart if it got crushed in my pockets until morning.”
Gingerly, she takes the caterpillar from the alpha, years of practice with her daughter managing to curb her disgust at the insect, setting it in an empty cup. “She’ll love it, thank you.”
“I’m sure she will. If anything, my sister is remarkably easy to get gifts for.” Rhaenyra nods, lifting the crown off her head, and begins working the chain at her chest, pinning the cape to her. “Gods, it’s almost like this damn thing gets heavier the longer I wear it.”
“Come here and let me.” Alicent says, taking over the clasps, while Rhaenyra goes pliant under her hands, content as anything. “How was the court treating you today?”
“Tedious and long. Two hours sitting through a dispute between two houses that have despised each other since before the Conquest and will keep inventing reasons to hate each other even after we’re all dust.” she complains, letting Alicent take her coat off. “I don’t know how you managed it, truly.”
“Well, to be fair, it was during peacetime so less reason for conflict, but most of those petitions were handled by my father, as you know. I was mostly there to keep the council in check. But what my Father always says it just takes patience and time to sift through what’s worth listening.”
“It takes the patience of a damn Septa, that’s for sure.” the alpha takes Alicent’s hand, pressing an absent kiss to the inside of her wrist, a gesture with nothing behind it other than tenderness. “Thank the Gods I already have white hair. Another year of this and I’d have gone gray from the stress.”
“I don’t know,” Alicent shrugs, tugging Rhaenyra closer until she’s sat on the bed, and Alicent can throw a leg over her lap, “You’ve proven yourself rather patient when it comes to me.” unlike the others of her designation, always so gentle and patient, deferring to Alicent’s pace, whether Alicent was in the mood to be ravished or worshipped.
The omega settles fully into Rhaenyra’s lap, savoring the way the alpha’s scent blooms thick and warm around them, heavy and comforting in a way Alicent has never been able to resist. She kisses her with growing hunger, rolling her hips in a slow, deliberate grind that draws a sharp, ragged breath from Rhaenyra.
The alpha’s hands are everywhere she’s allowed—gripping her thighs, thumbs pressing just beneath her breasts like she’s dying to touch more.
Rhaenyra’s mouth drags down to Alicent’s neck again, teeth grazing that sensitive spot where her scent is strongest, Alicent feels the dangerous pull of it, her omega craving for Rhaenyra to bite her and claim her in front of the world.
“Rhaenyra—” she gasps, equal parts warning and moan. Her fingers tighten in silver hair and she yanks Rhaenyra’s head back, hard enough to make the alpha whimper.
Rhaenyra’s eyes are glassy, pupils blown wide, lips shiny and parted. A low, frustrated growl rumbles in her chest.
“I can’t help it,” she rasps, straining against Alicent’s grip like she wants nothing more than to bury her face there again. “You smell so fucking good—sweet, wet, mine. Let me taste you properly, Alicent, please. I’ll be careful, I swear, I just need—”
“You can never help yourself. You will mark me.” she cuts her off, even aching as she is, feeling her wetness soaking through her smallclothes, but out of the two of them it is Alicent who can keep her head above water and think of matters beyond this room, so she keeps her grip tight, keeping her just out of reach, even as Rhaenyra’s tongue darts out again, the denial seemingly making her more desperate.
“I know you, Rhaenyra. You can never control yourself. You will mark me, and then what will my handmaidens say? Do you want them to know you’ve had me?”
Rhaenyra’s eyes flutter shut at the mental image, possesive as always. “No, fuck, Gods, Alicent, I’m losing my mind, I can smell you, I need to taste you, will you–”
For a moment she feels the old thrill of power—her father’s daughter still, delighting in how the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms trembles for her and her alone. But that power is slipping. Her own hunger is greater tonight, a deep, selfish need that has only grown sharper since the war.
Alicent tries to hold onto her control, fraying as it is. She keeps grinding down in slow, torturous rolls that make them both gasp. Every time Rhaenyra whines and strains and begs so prettily, Alicent feels a vicious thrill of power — but her own body is betraying her, answering the alpha’s call.
Too consumed by her thoughts to answer, she pulls her underthings to the side, sinking down in one slow, slick slide.
The sound they make is raw, almost pained. Alicent’s head falls back, lips parted on a silent cry as she feels herself stretch around her, full and burning and perfect. Rhaenyra’s hands grip her hips with bruising strength, but she does not thrust—she waits, trembling beneath her, always waiting for permission even when she is shaking apart with need.
“Seven hells, Rhaenyra, move.” she pants against the alpha’s mouth.
Rhaenyra drives up into her with deep, urgent strokes, hands gripping her hips like a lifeline. Alicent meets every thrust, riding her with a greed she no longer tries to hide. The wet slap of skin fills the room, mingling with their ragged breaths. She had meant to tease, to draw this out, to make Rhaenyra beg until she was hoarse—but her own need has overtaken her.
She comes first—suddenly, violently—clenching hard around Rhaenyra as pleasure rips through her. Her thighs shake, a broken cry tearing from her throat while she grinds down, riding out every pulse of it.
“Fuck— Alicent—” Rhaenyra’s voice is ragged, her hips stuttering as she tries to pull out right after, hands tightening on Alicent’s waist to lift her off before she tips over the edge.
Alicent clamps down.She drops her full weight, thighs locking tight around Rhaenyra’s hips, and grinds down hard, keeping every inch buried inside her. “No,” she gasps, still trembling through the aftershocks. “Don’t you dare. Stay.”
“Alicent— I’m close.”
“Don’t you want to fill me up properly? Claim me like that, even if no one else can know?”
She clenches deliberately around her on the next downstroke, and Rhaenyra’s head falls back against the headboard with a choked groan.
“Fuck—yes,” the alpha rasps, eyes glassy. “I want it so badly—want to fill you, give you everything—”
“Then give it to me,” Alicent breathes, pressing her forehead to Rhaenyra’s. “Please.”
Rhaenyra lets out a guttural groan, burying herself to the hilt and spilling deep inside her, pulse after pulse of heat. Alicent holds her there, thighs locked tight, refusing to let even an inch slip away until she has taken all of it.
After, she lies with her cheek to Rhaenyra's shoulder, pleasantly ruined, and the room is warm and dim and Rhaenyra is drawing idle shapes along her spine in that maddening tender way, and all is, for the span of perhaps a quarter hour, well.
“Don’t forget to fetch me the moon tea,” Alicent murmurs into her collarbone, almost as an afterthought.
Rhaenyra's hand stops.
“Mhm.” she says — which is not quite an answer, and which Alicent, drowsy and content, makes the error of ignoring.
“I can't very well find myself with child in any case. The dowager queen, unwed, swelling with child— I should think even Beesbury might raise an objection to that. I'm not some tavern omega who can blame the harvest festival and be done with it.”
Instead of a laugh or a joke, Rhaenyra remains suspiciously quiet, which on its’ own is enough for Alicent open one eye.
“Rhaenyra. What did you do.”
“Nothing!”
She raises an eyebrow.
Rhaenyra swallows, suddenly nervous, which then in turn causes Alicent’s hackles to rise.
“The council presses me to wed again, as you know. Stability of the realm and the like.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like me to draw a list of possible candidates?” she offers, even as the words taste bitter in her mouth. She thinks it may be easier, in the end, if she were the one to choose Rhaenyra’s eventual bride—ensure no threat to Rhaenyra’s fondness for her, even as the thought of standing in the Sept, watching Rhaenyra wrap her hands around someone else, someone who’s not her, sends sharp jolts of anxiety through her stomach.
“There is precedent, you see—”
“A precedent.” Alicent lifts her head off her shoulder.
“Alicent, listen. I've been thinking on it. Truly thinking, not just — I keep coming back to the war, to what it cost—Jacaerys, Lucerys, Joff, Daemon, your sons, the smallfolk by the thousand — I cannot believe the gods burned that much of the world down for nothing, that there's no purpose. I have to believe I was kept living through all of it for something larger than what came before.” her eyes have gone hazy, Rhaenyra no longer in the room, but the Dragon Queen.
“Rhaenyra. Do not.”
“Aegon the Conqueror —”
“Rhaenyra.”
“ — had two wives,” Rhaenyra finishes, proud, like a dog that has eaten one of its owner's shoes and trots up tail wagging to be praised for it. “Visenya and Rhaenys. Two consorts. And there is no reason, none, that I could not —”
Alicent freezes, momentarily pulling away.
Rhaenyra reaches for her, a hand sliding to her waist, the old reflex, drawing her back down toward the warmth. Alicent slaps it away and is up and out of the bed before she can draw her hand back, cold and naked now without the warmth of Rhaenyra against her, but far too furious to notice either.
“Let me be certain I have understood you,” she says, slowly. “You have thought about the legacy of Aegon the Conqueror — the man who unified the Seven Kingdoms, who forged the Iron Throne from the swords of his enemies, who established a dynasty that ruled for three centuries — and the element of his reign you have chosen to revive is the part where he had two wives.”
“That is not how I would...”
“Not the peace won with dragons.”
“Alicent, love–”
“Not the unification of the realm under a single crown, which you have, I would note, already managed, entirely on your own, without a second consort. The two wives is the part of his legend that you want to resurrect?”
Rhaenyra opens her mouth, and then — wisely, for the first time all evening — closes it.
“And which am I to be,” Alicent continues, pleasantly, not for the first time reminded of her years by Viserys’s side, because if not pleasantly calm, she’d be screaming. “Visenya or Rhaenys? I should like to know which sister I am, in this arrangement you have had divine providence on. I have always thought of myself as more of a Visenya, but I confess I am open to other interpretations.”
“You are being —”
“I’m being what, Rhaenyra? Hysterical? Tell me, who is the second wife? Who did this madness come from?”
“It does not matter where it—”
“Stop talking. Look at me. And tell me, in plain Common Tongue, with no flowery language in it, whose idea this actually was, because it sure as seven hells did not come to you.”
The pause goes on a beat too long, and Alicent fights the need to pick at her nails.
“You must see the difficulty,” Rhaenyra says, carefully, not yet naming anyone. “I cannot simply wed you, Alicent. You were my father's queen. The realm would never — the smallfolk already dislike me, they call mercy weakness, would call upon the faith. It cannot be only you. It has to be — it has to be balanced. Someone the people already love. Someone common-born, someone the city claims as its own, so that the whole of it reads not as scandal but as—”
“Ah, so it’s Mysaria. I should have guessed.” she concludes coldly, the Lyseni’s particular flavor of manipulation now fully legible. A part of Alicent is even impressed, while the bigger part wants to end her.
“It is finished between us,” Rhaenyra says quickly — too quickly, the words tumbling out ahead of any question Alicent has actually asked. “Whatever you are imagining, I do not love her, not as I love you. I’m fond of her, it’s true, but it is not — this is not about that, it is about what the realm will accept–”
“Finished, you say?" she hisses, incredulity outrunning the fury for a moment, the sheer gall and madness of the moment fully taking over. “Your council wishes you to remarry. A highborn omega. Some Lannister or Baratheon girl with coffers behind her, gold which you require, and you have, allegedly independently, decided the former Lysene whore who you spend your ruts with is your ideal bride?”
Rhaenyra pushes herself up so she’s sitting, seemingly preparing to get up and go to her, but at the glare Alicent sends her way, wisely retreats.
The omega takes a breath, not even close to finished.
“It is not enough, apparently — that I lie here and say nothing of how you spend your ruts. I have swallowed that, Rhaenyra. I have been so terribly gracious about that, even as it tears me up inside, knowing that you spend it with another, no matter the reason." She laughs, once, with no humor anywhere in it. “And now you would have me believe you've thought your way, all on your own, to marrying her.”
Rhaenyra shakes her head, clearly about to interrupt. A horrible thought then crosses Alicent’s mind, enough to briefly shock her back to the present.
“Tell me the truth. Is she with your bastard? Is that what this is — have you got her with child and dressed it up in Aegon the Conqueror so you needn't say the plain ugly truth of it to my face?”
“What?” Rhaenyra actually recoils, thoughts of prophecy knocked clean out of her by sheer affront. “No — gods, no, Alicent, she's barren, she cannot — that's the whole of it, why she's perfect—”
The candlestick is in Alicent's hand and across the room before she's decided to throw it. It misses, badly, clangs off the wall behind Rhaenyra's head and rolls under the table. Rhaenyra, to her credit, doesn’t recoil, which somehow just serves to enrage Alicent further, more than a clean hit would have.
“She is perfect,” Alicent repeats, like Rhaenyra spoke high valyrian. “Do go on. Explain to me precisely how her being barren makes her perfect.”
“Because any children would be ours,” Rhaenyra says, tone filled with awe, as if it’s a kidness Mysaria would bestow upon them. “Yours and mine. There is no muddying it, no second claimant or question of blood, she gives the realm a beloved second consort and a name the smallfolk cheer, and asks nothing of the succession, takes nothing from you, from us, don’t you see? She will be a consort in just the name, while the two of us build the life we’ve always wanted.”
And there it is, Alicent thinks, the thing underneath the divine idea, and it is so much worse for being almost sweet: Rhaenyra has not, in fact, fallen in love with two women and gotten too greedy. Rhaenyra has thought herself into a loophole, all around the need to have Alicent in the open.
“I will throw the chamberpot at your head next, Rhaenyra, and I will not miss, so you’d better think carefully before speaking again.”
“You're twisting it—”
“Go on. Correct me then. Tell me you are not lying in the warmth of my own bed, not an hour since you came inside me, proposing in dead earnest that I make room. That I shuffle aside and share you with your spymistress, ostensibly for the good of the realm.”
“It is the only way I can have you,” Rhaenyra finally says, the grandeur at last stripped from her voice. “Don't you understand? I cannot wed you alone — they would never let me, never — but beside her, with her, the realm would swallow it, and we would not have to hide, never again.”
“Don’t you see? It’s her design, she tells you what you want to hear, plays to your weaknesses and even has you calling it sensible.”
Alicent regards her for a long moment.
She is furious. She intends to remain furious for some considerable time. But beneath the fury, unwelcome as ever, lurks the thing that has always been her ruin where this woman is concerned — that she understands her, entirely, down to the gears, and finds the grief beneath all this nonsense genuinely sad.
It moves her precisely nowhere. Certainly not enough to let Rhaenyra stay or explain herself further into a hole.
“Get dressed,” she says, softly, refusing to shout even now. “It's late. You'll be missed at your own apartments, and we cannot have the realm wondering what its Conqueror-reborn has got to.”
“Alicent, please—”
“Get the fuck out, Rhaenyra.”
Rhaenyra gives her one more wounded look, silently asking her to reconsider, before she obeys, leaving Alicent to the silence of her room and the dying light of the candles.
Alicent sits alone in the cooling bed a while. It seems she’d have to pay a visit to the Spymistress’ quarters tomorrow.